11.4.05

An article (Anti-porn crusader Dworkin dies, April 12) from BBC News brings the news that feminist writer Andrea Dworkin has died. The news is getting bigtime coverage all over the place, with good articles from The Guardian (also here) and The Independent. We will hope that the American press comes up with some articles that are half as thoughtful. Dworkin has apparently been living here in Washington for the past several years, which I did not know. As an impressionable undergraduate, I did some coursework in Women's Studies, and I remember being shocked by the radical nature of her work, with sentences like "Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies." She may have pushed her theories to the limit, but she was on the money as far as how she deconstructed the misogyny of popular culture.